Chapter 13. Parsing and Similar Tasks
This is a chapter of tasks that programmers might recognize. It’s not necessarily more advanced than other bash script recipes in the book, but if you are not a programmer, these tasks might seem obscure or irrelevant to your use of bash. We won’t do much explaining of the reasons why you’d find yourself in these situations (as a programmer, you’ll recognize some if not all of them). Even if you don’t recognize the situation, you should read them for what you can learn about bash.
Some of the recipes in this chapter include the parsing of
command-line arguments. Recall that the typical way to specify options on a
shell script is to have a leading minus sign and a single letter. For
example, an option for your script to give fewer messages might use -q as a flag to mean quiet mode. Sometimes an
option might take an argument. For example, a user option where you need to
specify a username might use -u followed
by the username. This distinction will be made clear in this chapter’s first
recipe.
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